It's been crazy busy!

Sorry I have not been blogging...it's been crazy busy! Last week I was getting ready for the arrival of my family, Tason, David, Armilyn & Alexander. They arrived on Thursday and Friday. It's the first time my brother Tason has come to visit us in Texas. On Friday afternoon we had plans to go river tubing on the Comal in New Braunfels - but right as we were about to leave to go do that Stephen misplaced the van keys. We searched for a few hours with no luck. He picked up another van from work and we decided to go to San Marcos which is closer by since it was getting so late. Well when we arrived they were closed. I guess they're only open on the weekends during May. Bummer! So we still stayed and played on the river area. Surprisingly Madeline was brave enough to try out the tree rope swing since she saw her Tante Armilyn do it. Can you tell how proud Stephen was?


Here's Alex and James, very happy to be swimming and playing at our neighborhood pool!

On Saturday Stephen found the missing van keys in our trash can. Sigh. We headed to Stephen's work to swap out cars and then got comfy in an XL Tahoe for our 3 hour road trip to Houston for our 2nd cousin, Ariel's high school graduation. It was at Reliant stadium where the Texans play. Here's the whole gang after the ceremony and after we gave her the traditional leis for graduating.

On Sunday we headed back to our home. With some more ohana visiting, my cousin Eric's family from Hawaii flew into Houston and drove to our home to visit for 2 days. We decided to go tubing on the Comal since we didn't on Friday. It turned out to be an adventure! Above are my two older brothers, Tason and David.

We had a group of 15 including 5 kids. Well the river was higher and flowing faster than I remembered from last summer - we did get a lot of rain this winter so I'm sure that affected it. Well some of the kids freaked out as we went down some tube shoots (aka rapids) and they got drenched or knocked out of their tube. Add to that a chaos of mass amounts of crazy college students on the river - it made the start of our tubing adventure a bit stressful. But as we got down the river a bit where it was more calm - the kids started to enjoy the tubing again. Um I just don't think we'll be coming again to this river on a holiday or with the kiddos - they got their first taste of college kids acting like it's Spring Break or Girls Gone Wild! All of us laughed about it afterwards as it turned out to be a crazy adventure but we made the best of it and still had fun.

They all had to fly back a day early (the joys of flying stand-by) because the Tuesday flights suddenly became over booked...so before they left I had my cousin take a photo of all of us as requested by my mom - she wanted one of all her kids and grandkids. Here's one of the shots.

Now onto more craziness...leaving for my best friend's wedding in a couple of days and Madeline graduates Kindergarten on Thursday!